So many doomsday theories today involve contact with extraterrestrial beings. As anticiption of some kind of civilization-changing event builds to its climax, people are counting on a certain type of alien being for solutions to our ultimate survival. These beings are called Greys.

Made popular by Whitley Strieber's book, Communion, these grey skinned, 4 foot tall beings with oversized, pear shaped heads and huge black eyes have become the archetype for our obsession with non-human entities. These days it is politically correct to call them "Zetas" with the belief that their origin lies in the Zeta Reticuli star system, some 35 light years away. How and why they came here is the source of a plethora of interesting stories with both good and bad implications for humanity.

Early close encounters

I decided to explore some of these stories to see how we have come to call the Grey's "Zetas" and how we have learned what we know about them. I looked at some of the earliest documented encounters of aliens and their spaceships and paid special attention to the descriptions given of the unearthly inhabitants.

Although there are many abduction stories, the ones I have selected stand out from the rest because of their credibility. The people reporting the abductions are not celebrities and have had no prior experience with anything like this before. They had nothing to gain from reporting their experiences and, in fact, many regretted that they had done so.

Suprisingly, early descriptions of extraterrestrials do not appear to be typical "Greys" at all.

1957: Brazil

Antonio Villas Boas was a Brazilian farmer claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials in 1957. His claims were among the first alien abduction stories to receive world wide attention.

On October 16, 1957, 23-year-old Boas was plowing his farm with a tractor at night to avoid the hot temperatures of the day. He saw what he described as a "red star" in the night sky. This "star" approached him, growing in size, until he recognized it as an egg-shaped craft with a red light at its front and a rotating cupola on top. The craft landed in the field on three "legs". Boas then decided to run from the scene.

He first attempted to leave on his tractor but its lights and engine died so he decided to run on foot. However, he was seized by a five-foot humanoid wearing grey coveralls and a helmet. Its eyes were small and blue. It made noises like barks or yelps of a small dog. Suddenly, three similar beings joined the first humanoid in restraining Boas, dragging him inside their craft.

Inside the craft, Boas was stripped naked then covered from head-to-toe with a strange gel. He was then led into a large semicircular room, through a doorway that had strange red symbols written over it. He was later able to recall them [right]. Inside this room, the humanoid beings took samples of Boas' blood from his chin. He was then taken to a third room while some kind of gas was pumped into the room, making Boas become violently ill.

Boas claims he was soon joined in the room by a female humanoid. She was very attractive, and naked, the same height as the other beings, had a small, pointed chin and large, blue catlike eyes. The hair on her head was long and platinum blonde but Boas noticed her underarm and pubic hair were bright red. Boas said he was strongly attracted to the woman, and the two had sexual intercourse. During this act, Boas noted that the female did not kiss him but instead nipped him on the chin.

After having intercourse, the female humanoid smiled and rubbed her belly while gesturing upwards. Boas understood this to mean that she was going to raise their child in "up there" in space. Boas said that he felt angered after the encounter. He felt as though he had been used and was little more than "a good stallion" for the humanoids.

He was then given his clothing back and taken on a tour of the ship. He attempted to steal a small clock-like object as a souvenir his encounter, but was caught by the humanoids. He was then escorted off the ship and watched as it took off. When he returned home, Boas discovered that four hours had passed.

Following his abduction, Boas suffered from nausea, weakness, headaches and lesions on the skin. Dr. Olavo Fontes of National School of Medicine of Brazil examined the farmer and concluded that he had been exposed to a large dose of radiation from some source and was now suffering from mild radiation sickness.

Antonio Villas Boas later became a lawyer, married and had four children. He died in 1992, and stuck to the story of his alleged abduction for his entire life.

The aliens who abducted Boas were 5 feet tall, had small eyes and wore grey coveralls and a helmet. The female humanoid had human features except her eyes were blue and shaped like a cat. She also had a pointed chin. These clearly are not the features of the "zeta." In fact, Boas never asked or was told where these beings came from.

But one other abduction four years later planted the seed which would grow to become legend and which would pin down the origin of the best known aliens.

1961: New Hampshire

The story of Betty and Barney Hill is perhaps the most famous abduction story. It was made famous by an article in Life Magazine and later by a film. But much of the legend surrounding the abduction has been distorted or edited to make a better story. The real facts were revealed in an interview conducted with Betty Hill some years after her husband had passed away.

According to Betty, the couple had been in Montreal and were returning to their New Hampshire home on Route 3. Betty was the first to notice a bright star in the evening sky and mused that perhaps it was a new planet or a satellite. As they continued to drive the bright object appeared to move closer, prompting Betty to taunt her husband and joke that the object was following them. Betty waved her arms and shouted "Hello. Here we are!" as if to get its attention.

As the object moved closer, the couple became more curious. Barney stopped the car and Betty got a pair of binoculars to see what it was. She observed several different colored lights blinking and gave the binoculars to Barney.

Almost immediately Barney saw a row of windows and what appeared to be "people" standing inside the object and looking down at him and Betty. One in particular seemed to be staring right at him and somehow communicating that he should not move and stay there. Barney would later recall how he felt vulnerable, like a trapped animal, and insisted that they get back inside the car and drive away.

As they drove past Indian Head, Barney took a wrong turn and ended up on a small dirt road. Suddenly his headlights revealed several people blocking his path. The car died and the group of "people" surrounded the vehicle and helped Betty and Barney through the wooded area to their spaceship.

During the abduction, Barney was mostly in a trance like state. Betty claims that she initially was in the same kind of trance but that she was able to come out of it and regain her full consciousness. She asked, "Where are you taking us?" and was reassured that they would not be harmed.

Once inside the spaceship, Betty and Barney were both subjected to a physical examination in different rooms. Blood, tissue and hair was taken and their clothes were removed. Betty reported that there were 11 aliens. One was the translator (she called him "the leader"), another performed the examination and nine others ("the crew") assisted them. She described them as having human like faces with slightly larger eyes, no hair and dressed in what looked like military uniforms.

Much of what Betty recalled in her interview was after she had been regressed in hypnosis. Initially her sessions were tape recorded but she was tol she would not remember them. Then, in the final session, she was allowed to hear her own account of what happened and to remember all the details.

At one point, when Betty's examination was finished, she was allowed to converse with the translator. During her conversation they were interrupted by the examiner when Barney's false teeth were discovered. The examiner immediately wanted to see if Betty's teeth also could be removed. Satisfied that they were real, Betty continued her conversation with the translator. It was then that she was shown a star map.

Betty first described the map as being a 3D image with circles and lines. Some of the lines were thick and she was told that these were popular routes that the aliens took between different sun systems. Broken lines, she was told, were expeditions to new worlds.

At one point the translator asks Betty, "Do you know where your sun is on this map?" Betty did not and so the translator did not attempt to explain where they were from. However, much later, in a hypnosis session, Betty was told that she would recall the map and that she should allow herself to draw it. Betty did draw the star map [above] which was then examined by astronomers and determined to depict the star system Zeta Reticuli.

Betty had drawn several small stars on the map that were initially unknown but were only later discovered by astronomers using high powered telescopes. This seemed to be the supporting data needed to validate Betty's account of the abduction and began the belief that alien life originated from that star system.

Betty and Barney were eventually returned to their car and arrived home several hours past their anticipated arrival time. This was one of the first descriptions of "missing time" following an abduction. The couple suffered nightmares and insomnia and eventually sought help for their problems, resulting eventually in their now famous hypnosis sessions. After they were frequently interviewed by both scientists and the military.

They later learned that an object had been tracked by near by Pease Air Base on the same night as their abduction. This all made their experience a landmark case in both belief in alien life forms and of human abductions.

But Betty never considered this to be an abduction. When asked, she would say, "No. It wasn't an abduction. It was a meeting." And when shown images of the typical "Zeta" with big eyes, pear shaped head and grey skin, Betty would say, "No. That's not what they looked like." She insisted that they were more human-like in appearance with eyes only slightly larger and more widely spaced.

In one photo [right] Betty holds a statue of the humanoid likeness of her abductors.

Despite the fact that Betty Hill rejects the image of the big-eyed Zetas as being the beings that abducted her, the common belief is that these beings are one and the same. In fact, every time I tried to find reference to the origin of the Grey aliens there was a reference to the Betty and Barney Hill case and Betty's starmap of Zeta Reticuli.

Moving a decade ahead, the next famous case takes us to Mississippi. This case is notable because the two victims of the abduction were severely traumatized and highly unlikely to have faked the event.

1973: Pascagoula, Mississippi

The strange case of nineteen-year-old Calvin Parker, and forty-two-year-old Charles Hickson actually began a day before their famous encounter. On October 10, 1973, fifteen different people, including two policemen reported seeing a large, silver UFO slowly fly over a housing project in St. Tammany Parish, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Only a scant 24 hours later, Hickson and Parker would have the scare of their lives; a frightening encounter with an eerie UFO.

The two men were both from the town of Gautier, Mississippi, and were doing some fishing in the Pascagoula River on a dark night about 9:00 P.M. They suddenly heard a type of buzzing behind them.

Both men turned around to see the source of the sound, and were amazed to see a glowing, egg-shaped object with bluish lighting on its front side.

The unusual craft was hovering just a few feet above the ground, and about 30 feet from the shore of the river. To their unbelief, a door opened in the object, and three strange beings began to float just above the water straight toward them. Though the beings had legs, they did not use them, they simply floated across the river.

Parker and Hickson would later describe the beings as "about five feet tall, had bullet-shaped heads without necks, slits for mouths, and where their noses or ears would be, they had thin, conical objects sticking out, like carrots from a snowman's head. They had no eyes, grey, wrinkled skin, round feet, and claw-like hands."

Hickson, frozen in fear and unbelief, was grabbed by two of these creatures, and the third one took Parker, who fainted from fright. Hickson would later relate that when the beings put their arms under his body to support him, he felt numb all over. He was then floated into a a brightly-lit room inside of the UFO. Inside this room, he floated, along with an eye-like device which examined him all over.

After his ordeal, Hickson was left floating, while the beings left the room, probably to examine Parker. Approximately 20 minutes after the ordeal had begun, it was over, and Hickson was floated back outside of the strange craft. Parker was crying, and praying on the ground. Only a moment or two later, the craft rose straight up into the air and disappeared.

As the two men began to regain their composure, they were uncertain as to what they should do. Reluctant to report their harrowing experience, they felt obligated to tell someone. Despite fearing ridicule, they telephoned Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi. Kessler referred their problem to their local sheriff's office.

Afraid of what reaction they might get from law enforcement, they opted instead to drive to their local newspaper. Finding the office closed, they decided to take their bizarre story to the sheriff after all. Naturally the sheriff felt the two men's story was some kind of hoax, and to get to the truth, he put Hickson and Parker into a room which was wired for sound, hoping that they would slip up, and reveal why they were perpetuating such a strange tale.

Calvin Parker Depiction, Pascagoula Alien Charles Hickson

Soon news of the event began to surface. The local press released the story first; quickly followed by the wire services. Within a few days, the Pascagoula incident was major news all over the USA. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), sent University of California professor James Harder to investigate; Dr. J. Allen Hynek, representing the US Air Force, also arrived to look into the story. Harder and Hynek interviewed Hickson and Parker together. Harder hypnotized Hickson, but he became so frightened that the session had to be aborted.

The two abductees were encouraged to take a lie-detector test, which they both passed. Harder and Hynek, both highly respected in their professions, believed the two men's story.

At a later date, Hynek stated; "There was definitely something here that was not terrestrial".

In what may be a related incident, a couple of weeks after this chilling account, Coast Guardsmen and fishermen had an encounter with an underwater metallic object.

This strange object had an amber light on it, and the Guard chased it in the Pascagoula River. The object was close enough to touch, but each time it was prodded with a large boat hook, it would turn off its light, move a distance away, and turn its light back on. This unusual encounter lasted about 40 minutes before the craft disappeared.

The Pascagoula encounter is one of the most unusual accounts of all UFO reports. Though the sighting and abduction involved only two witnesses, there were several other sightings of unusual flying objects on the same night. The two men have held to their story, though no earthly explanation has been offered for the strange events of the night of October, 11, 1973.

[Many thanks to ufocasebook.com for their excellent article on this subject.]

The last case is one which many people will be familiar with from the movie, Fire In The Sky, which involves Travis Walton, a young man who was working with six other loggers in an Arizona forest.

1975: Arizona

The seven man crew had just finished their work and were crammed into a pick-up truck, heading home on a remote logging road. It was early November and the sun light was gone, but the crew noticed a very bright light in the woods. They stopped to observe what appeared to be a flattened disc hovering near the road. One of the men, Travis, got out of the truck to get a closer look.

While staring up at the object, an intense blue light suddenly illuminated Travis, jolting him back as if he had been electrocuted. This put the rest of the crew in a panic and they quickly fled in the truck. After a brief discussion, the men decided to go back and get Travis, but he was gone. In shock, they drove to town and reported the incident to the local police.

At first, police suspected the story and thought that the men had either murdered Travis or that he had somehow had an accident that the loggers were trying to cover up. The crew was subjected to lie detector tests, but their stories were consistent and appeared truthful. Extensive searches of the area where the disc was seen revealed no evidence or trace of Travis.

Travis later recalled what happened to him. He says he was unconscious for an unknown amount of time, then awoke in what he first thought was a hospital. He thought, "Oh, My God, the hospital, they brought me to the hospital." He noticed that the atmosphere was very humid and hot. He felt uncomfortable and saw that he was still dressed in his work clothes. "I wonder why the nurse didn't at least take my jacket off?"

Regaining his awareness, Travis felt some kind of restraint around his waist. He could see some people moving in the distance and was eventually able to focus on them. Instead of doctors and nurses, Travis saw what he described as "horrible creatures."

Three beings with humanoid features were staring at him with unusually large, brown pupils, the size of quarters. They were a little under 5 ft. in height, thin and had "marshmallow looking" skin. Their small hands were delicate and without nails. Totally bald, their heads were disproportionately large for their little bodies. Frightened by the sight, Travis pushed one of the beings with his hand and was surprised that it was very light weight. "It felt spongy and soft," he would later relate.

He quickly got free of the restraint and was on his feet. "Keep back, damn you!"

Travis later recalled his fascination with the alien's "incredible eyes". The irises were twice the size of a normal human's eye, nearly an inch in diameter. The iris was so large that even parts of the pupils were hidden by the lids, giving the eyes a certain catlike appearance. There was very little of the white part of the eye showing. They had no lashes and no eyebrows. Their little mouths never moved.

After his aggressive stance the aliens left the room through an open door. "I have to get out of here," he thought.

Travis left the small room and found himself in an empty, curved hallway. He soon found a circular room with a domed roof, and three rectangular doorways which were shut. The room was empty except for one chair facing away from him. As he moved closer towards the center of this circular room he noticed that the room appeared darker until he was able to see stars. He noticed there were what appeared to be controls near the empty chair.

Afraid that someone was looking for him, Travis tried to leave the circular room. The doors would not open for him but suddenly one did, and Travis was confronted by a 6 foot tall, muscular built human being.
He quickly approached the man, asking him where he was and what was going on. But the man remained silent. The man took Travis out of the room, down the hallway to a door which opened, allowing him to leave the craft he was in. He suddenly found that he was inside yet another huge room which contained many other disc shaped craft.

Eventually he was led to another room in which there were two men and a woman. These three had similar characteristics to the first human he had seen. All four of them had a "family like" similarity. Travis again tried to initiate a conversation, but they were silent. "Would somebody please tell me where I am? What in hell is going on? What is this place?"

The woman and one of the men took Travis by the arm and led him to a table. The woman had an object that resembled an oxygen mask, yet no tubes were attached to it, only a small black golfball sized sphere. Soon he was falling asleep.
"Consciousness returned to me on the night I awoke to find myself on the cold pavement west of Heber, Arizona. I was lying on my stomach, my head on my right forearm. Cold air brought me instantly awake. I looked up in time to see a light turn off on the bottom of a curved, gleaming hull. As I raised my head up, a white light caught my eye just before it blinked off. Either a light had been turned off or a hatch had closed, cutting off the light from inside. I only caught a glimpse as I raised my head; I could not be sure which it was."

Travis called for help and was eventually given medical treatment. He was visibly in shock and eager to relate his story. Most shocking to Travis was when he learned that he had been gone for five days.

Neither Travis nor any of his crew have ever retracted their story of his abduction. It remains one of the most reliable accounts of an alien abduction, yet, as we have seen, it does not describe his abductors as having the typical Grey, or "Zeta" appearance.

Where are the Zetas?

Aside from the Mississippi abduction case, almost all of the abductions we have described involve aliens with a humanoid face and large, round eyes. This appears to be the standard model prior to the publication of Whitley Streiber's book, Communion, in which he describes the now stereotypical pear-shaped head and huge black, almond shaped eyes. Now commonly knows as "Zetas", it is ironic that these beings got their name from the famous starmap drawn by Betty Hill -- yet Betty was quite emphatic that her abductors did NOT look like the Greys portrayed by Streiber.

What could be going on here?

The human mind likes to use symbols to represent concepts. Often these symbols become more real than the objects they try to represent. We see this in children's art when they are asked to draw a house, or a dog, or even a person. A certain archetypal shape or form is used to generalize a concept that can be complex and varied. These symbols have a cultural foundation that can change over time, becoming more standardized with each successive generation.

A good example is Santa Claus. The original concept [above:left] has changed much from its initial representation. Today we might all agree that this figure has certain characteristics that form a familiar motif.

The same can also be said for our cultural imagery of Jesus -- even George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have been morphed into homogenous cultural icons that deviate from their true appearance. Could the same thing be happening with the many and varied types of extraterrestrials who visit our inhabited planet for research and experimentation?

Some have suggested that our concept of the Grey originated in Aleister Crowley's LAM [above:left] or in Munch's painting The Scream. These images have been copied and morphed by science fiction in popular series like Twighlight Zone and Outer Limits and shape our expectations of what an alien being could and should look like.

But while it is convenient to imagine the Grey's familiar features, the real encounters with extraterrestrials could be much more frightening and thus blocked or altered in our recollection of abduction events.

Other types of aliens

Consider this creature, called the "tomato head" whose body was photographed in Laredo, Texas following the examination of a crashed disc.

The Laredo, Texas UFO Crash is a case in which at least two U.S. military aircraft allegedly chased a 90-foot diameter silver disc-shaped UFO across Texas before watching the object crash approximately 30 miles south-southwest of Laredo, Texas on July 7, 1948. U.S. servicemen were reportedly dispatched from a nearby military base to cordon off the UFO crash site until a special U.S. retrieval team arrived to examine the wreckage and carry it away to a military base in San Antonio, Texas. Supposedly, the badly burned body of a non-human entity was recovered from the crash site. -- http://naturalplane.blogspot.com

Equally frightening but perhaps visually appealing, the phenomenon of female, human-like aliens pops up in many abduction stories. Typically, the female is introduced to the male abductee by a short being with large eyes and the abductee is encouraged (or forced) to have sex with her. This has initiated a rash of stories about hybrids.

The most unusual of these abduction stories happened in 1992 to a man named Peter Khoury.

Early on the of July 23, 1993, Peter Khoury had driven his wife to work, then returned home and went back to bed for a short while. Suddenly, he bolted wide awake and sat up. There "were two humanoid females sitting on the bed, both entirely naked," says Peter.

"These two women looked human in nearly every way. They had well proportioned adult bodies. One looked somewhat Asian, with straight dark shoulder-length hair and dark eyes. The other looked "perhaps Scandinavian-like", with light-coloured ("maybe bluish") eyes and long blond hair that fell half-way down her back."

Her hair was especially significant for Peter. "I had never seen a hair style like that. It was curled something like Farrah Fawcett, but to an extreme... It just looked really exotic in a way."

Peter noted that "these women were not exactly human. Their faces were somewhat odd -- not unattractive, but too chiselled, with very high cheekbones and eyes that were two or three times larger than normal."

Peter took a special interest in the blonde. He perceived that her face was too long, "I have never seen a human looking like that."

"The blonde, who was sitting in a kneeling position on the bed, seemed to be in charge", and Peter felt that she was communicating somehow with the dark-haired woman, telepathetically "who was sitting with her legs partly folded under her. There was something stiff, almost blank, in the expressions of the women."

Though stunned by the sudden appearance of the women in his bedroom, "the blonde reached out with both her hands and cupped the back of my head, drawing my face toward her chest."

"She was pretty strong," Peter said. "She pulled me over and my mouth was basically on her nipple. And I bit."

Peter doesn't know why he bit the woman, but even though he felt a small piece of her nipple come away in his teeth, she did not cry out.

Peter said the Blonde Human-looking Extraterrestrial looked at the Asian Human-looking Extraterrestrial... and the Blonde-looking ET, looked at him, with similar "contemplative" shock or confusion.

Peter said that he involuntarily swallowed the small nipple fragment and it got caught in his throat. He went into a coughing fit. Then "suddenly, the two women simply disappeared."

Some time during Peter's contact with these Human-looking Extraterrestrials, he was apparently abducted. When he realized the women were gone, he tried to clear his throat by drinking water. It didn't work. Then he then had "an urge to go to the bathroom."

It was in the bathroom that he realized "his penis felt very painful." Standing in the bathroom, he then decided to "pull back the foreskin and found two thin blond strands of hair wrapped tightly around."

He struggled to unravel the pieces of hair as the pain became an intense burning sensation. Finally he managed to removed the two pieces of hair and immediately put them in a small sealable plastic bag.

"The reason I did that was because I knew that there was no way, no way at all, that a hair that size and wrapped around the way it was should have been there... [T]hinking of these women, the thing in my throat, the hair, something bizarre had just happened."

The nipple fragment in Peter's throat stayed there for three days. He coughed constantly. He tried clearing his throat with water, bread, anything he could think of, but nothing helped. On the third day, the feeling in his throat just went away.

DNA examination of Human-looking Extraterrestrials

The pieces of hair, carefully stored away since the encounter, became the subject of the first openly-reported scientific DNA test on a possible abduction-related sample.

The blond hairs were extremely thin and almost clear in colour. It was determined that the hair was not chemically treated, because if it had been, little or no mitochondrial DNA could have been recovered. However, using the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) process, good quality DNA was recovered.

For comparison, samples were also taken of Peter's hair and that of his wife Vivian. DNA was successfully extracted from Peter's hair, but no usable DNA was recovered from Vivian's hair, possibly because of chemical treatment.

After thorough testing of the hair samples, the scientists of the Anomaly Physical Evidence Group arrived at a startling conclusion. The thin blond hair, which appeared to have come from a light-skinned caucasian-like looking woman, could not have come from a normal human of that racial type. Instead, though apparently 'human', the hair showed five distinctive DNA markers that are characteristic of a rare sub-group of the Chinese Mongoloid racial type.

A detailed survey of the literature on variations in mitochondrial DNA, comprising tens of thousands of samples, showed only four other people on record with all five of the distinctive markers in the blond hair. All four were Chinese, with black hair.

The identity of the women and the circumstances remains an enigma.

More to come...

While these abduction stories are certainly interesting, they do little to shed light on the ubiquitous Grey. Instead, the abduction accounts reveal the many other forms of alien life that are observing and interacting with our own species. But still, the Greys have captured the hearts and minds of a majority of believers in extraterrestrial beings and we will explore this in our next installment.

We will see that, since Stieber's book, Communion, the Grey has become the most common form of alien reported in abductions and sightings. They have also been the subject of many conspiracy theories, including the famous "war" between the US military and a colony of Greys that inhabited an underground base in Dulce, New Mexico.

Some believe that the Greys made a deal with the governments of the world, exchanging their advanced technology for the right to abduct and experiment upon human citizens. We'll explore why they need to do this.

But we will also learn that the Greys are able to communicate with common people and that they play a key role in alerting the population about catastrophic events such as the next planetary pole shift.

Whether you believe in this or not, it is an interesting story... next time.